From Charlie Rangel, Representative from New York, at a campaign rally for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo:
“We have to win. We have to be able to send a national message with Andrew Cuomo. And the thing is: Everything we believe in — everything we believe in — they [Republicans] hate. They don’t disagree — they hate! They think if you didn’t come from Europe 30 years ago, you didn’t even make it. Some of them believe that slavery isn’t over and they and think they won the Civil War!” Rangel shouted.
Mr. Rangel may want to check the history books. It was a Republican Commander-in-Chief, Abraham Lincoln, who led the North to victory in the Civil War, so in that sense the Republicans did win the Civil War. It is a fairly well-known fact that Lincoln was against slavery and was in fact instrumental in ending it. While one faction of the Democratic Party opposed slavery in the 1860 election, a southern faction supported it. If Rangel were to dig further, he would find that the Republicans’ record on civil rights since the Civil War, while not without blemishes, is exemplary compared to the Democrats’, whose “Solid South” block stymied Civil Rights legislation and integration efforts for decades.
